"Word Choice"

-- Updated January 2017

What started as a PowerPoint time-waster (see below) morphed into a project to help me practice HTML/CSS and Javascript/jQuery. In this little web app, you can choose to create your "best" sentence out of a limited selection culled from the most popular searches on the web. You do this by clicking on one word at a time, until there are no more choices -- because the internet ran out of more word choice options.

It's easier experienced than explained. Check it out by clicking on the image here, or on this text link to Word Choice v0.1.

I'm hesitant to call Word Choice v0.1 a game, as it's more of a toy; there are no conditions for winning or losing, although technically you can gain more points depending on your choices. It's more art than game, although I still find it fun. You can see that it's got a paper motif, and the design, sounds, and animations were intended to combine to give the feeling of shuffling printed words around a desk. Maybe I'll take what started here and turn it into something bigger later.

References:

1. Link to Word Choice v0.1

-- Updated September 2016

"Word Path" is the unofficial code name for my project to make a silly "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style game -- but one word at a time. I was inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood, text-based RPGs from the Commodore-64, and the one-word-at-a-time games you might play in improv comedy classes.

You can download the PowerPoint prototype version of it here (491kb), or by clicking the link below.

It's based on a flowchart of word choices shown below. (To load the 600kb full size version in a new window, click the image.)

To play with the PowerPoint toy, first load up the PowerPoint in presentation mode. Then choose the word you want the most, out of the few choices presented. Keep on clicking, and eventually you'll see the full string of words, or full statement, that you clicked. You'll see that someone else already said that statement before on the internet. Happy playing!

References:

1. Download "Word Path" PowerPoint toy

-- Updated September 2016

This digital toy is a placeholder for a future game, I hope. I'd like to make a web-based game that works similarly to the PowerPoint, except with a much broader base of words. The code could scour the internet dynamically to offer word choices. In addition to the inherent art associated with discovering sentences and phrases that may have already been said before, I can also envision attaching points to the system based on how rare your final statement is on the internet.